Modern communication systems have a large number of capabilities including integration of various communication modalities with different services. For example, instant messaging, voice/video communications, data/application sharing, white-boarding, and other forms of communication may be combined with presence and availability information of subscribers. Such systems may provide subscribers with the enhanced capabilities such as providing instructions to callers for various status categories, alternate contacts, calendar information, and comparable features. Furthermore, collaboration systems enabling users to share and collaborate in creating and modifying various types of documents and content may be integrated with multimodal communication systems providing different kinds of communication and collaboration capabilities. Such integrated systems are sometimes referred to as Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC&C) systems.
In modern digital networks, intelligence may be applied at every point in the network so that each Network Element (NE) performs a deep packet inspection on every packet to determine the fingerprint of an application so that various actions such as Quality of Service (QOS), Intrusion Detection/Protection (IDS/IDP), Firewalling, Network Monitoring, Load Balancing, etc. can be performed. In some cases NEs can just inspect the five tuple information of an IP header and apply the corresponding action, but more and more sophisticated systems like UC&C use dynamic transport ports and encrypt the payload which makes the inspection difficult to perform. While there exist brute force heuristic mechanisms to handle some of these cases, these come at the expense of making NEs more intelligent (thereby increasing the cost) and more prone to errors.